DIOGENES PENDERGAST WALKED ALONG Central Park South, slowly swinging a billy club by its leather strap and whistling “She Was Poor but She Was Honest,” a tune that seemed to be on everyone’s lips that season. He had temporarily exchanged his foppish dress for the uniform of the Metropolitan Police—a disguise that both made him forgettable and ensured he could do almost anything without arousing curiosity.
Not that there would be any witnesses: it was two in the morning, and he had only the gas lamps for company.
Ahead and to the right rose a dark outline that, he thought with distaste, resembled the “Big Ciggy”—the grotesque Skidmore, Owings & Merrill sculpture that, a century in the future, would dominate a section of the Richmond, Virginia, skyline. The half-completed structure thrust up into the sky like a square straw, devoid of decoration. Tiny slots punctuated its flanks, following an invisible spiral, like the arrow slits of Caernarfon Castle. These, Diogenes assumed, were for wind bracing. The full moon threw a spectral illumination over its bulk, and he could see that its surface was covered in brick for perhaps two-thirds of its height: above that rose a wooden skeleton and steel frame. This was the work of Daniel Burnham, architect and developer, and it was awaiting the final delivery of bricks and precut steel.
He moved closer. Peering into one of the lower slits, he could make out a plumb bob, a sort of pendulum made from a string with a piece of chalk fixed to its base and touching a slate board—a rude implement for measuring the sway of the tower in the wind.
Unfinished, its top partially exposed to the elements, it was easy to see why the eccentric-looking thing was already being called “Burnham’s Folly.” It had none of the finishing touches that would make it the observation tower scheduled to open in three months. But Burnham’s intentions were still bigger: in Chicago, bids were currently being taken for the commission to design the Montauk Building. That, Diogenes knew, was where Burnham’s true interest lay: in constructing the tallest building in America—at fourteen stories, taller than either the Equitable Building or the Tribune Building, both erected in Manhattan over the last ten years. And in the future universe of Diogenes, Burnham had succeeded in building the Montauk—one of the most spectacular high-rises built up to that time, even though it enjoyed only a short life, being demolished around 1900. This ugly tower was the one thing that, to him, seemed an anomaly of this place—a construct that never existed in the Central Park of his own world. It was a vulgar and intrusive excrescence.
Stepping smartly up to the barricade erected around the structure, he undid the padlock with a policeman’s skeleton key and slipped inside. The base of the tower was surrounded by construction site detritus: piles of dirt, sawhorses, cut bricks, and pieces of steel. One foundation section was still exposed, and Diogenes noted the massive footings.
He made his way through the clutter and reached the entrance to the tower itself, which he unlocked with the same method. No workmen would be on site, day or night, until the rest of the building materials arrived. No guards were on hand, either, if for no other reason than there was nothing worth stealing.
After closing the door behind him, Diogenes lit a dark lantern. In one corner, surrounded by worktables, stood a small steel room, fashioned out of sheet metal, carefully welded. This functioned as a vault in which tools and other things of value were normally kept. Its door was set in place with a combination lock.
Diogenes approached the lock and twisted the dial right, then left, then right until the tumblers fell into place. The interior of the vault contained an array of equipment and four small, stout wooden boxes, covered with a drop cloth. Aloysius had been as good as his word: his man, Bloom, had contrived to have the fraternity of New York construction workers drop off the boxes earlier in the evening. Setting the lantern on a peg, he stepped in, pulled away the tarp, and—grabbing a nearby claw hammer—pried off their tops. He examined the neatly stacked red tubes of black powder with their coils of fuses, caps, and plaster inside.
He spent the next half hour gingerly carrying the sticks of explosives up the wooden steps and affixing them at various well-hidden spots. He made his way upward until, at last, he placed the final load directly beneath the wooden ceiling.
He paused to catch his breath, sitting on one of the steps and unbuttoning the top of his policeman’s overcoat. The moonlight, which had not deserted him during the last half hour, shone not only through the tall narrow windows, but also faintly through the cracks in a rectangular shape in the heavily braced ceiling. This, he realized, was the opening to the unfinished viewing parapet. Placing his palms against it, he dislodged it, then hoisted himself up onto the surface.
On the roof, there were not yet railings or posts of any kind: each side of the wooden square dropped off into darkness. Diogenes approached the south edge. He did not suffer from vertigo, but he nevertheless braced himself against the wind gusts that came and went at this height, which he estimated to be one hundred and seventy-five feet above ground.
As he raised his glance from the supporting platform and looked out over the city, he forgot all about the wind. There, below him, was the heart of Manhattan. Directly under his feet, where Central Park met a line of new apartment buildings and hotels, was the “Grand Circle” that, in ten more years, would host a statue of Christopher Columbus. Beyond it, Broadway ran crookedly south, breaking the otherwise neat grid of streets until it encountered the maze of alleys and lanes south of Houston. Despite the late hour, and the emptiness of the streets, faint sounds rose up to greet him: the nicker of a horse, a shout of laughter. The city was breathing, but it was a peaceful breathing … nothing like the garish cacophony of twenty-first-century New York. He could see countless twinkling lights, gas lamps illuminating the streets and margins of lower Manhattan with tiny jets of fire—but there were more, many more, that he could see only indirectly, shining within windows and from alleyways, and these gave the city a mysterious lambent glow, only increasing for Diogenes the sensation that he was staring down upon a living thing.
This was his new home—his domain. This was the place upon which he would make his mark. For all its technology, all its advances, the twenty-first century was sterile, insipid, and pitiless. It had been exceptionally cruel to him—and he to it. It was a flabby world, ruled by detumescent Babbitts, where ease had replaced vigor; a world nihilo ac malem.
He took a step back as this sudden, unexpected transport of emotion threatened to carry him over the edge. He stood still a moment, letting the strong wave of feeling pass and his breathing return to normal.
Now that everything was in place, he had only to attach fuses to each charge as he descended, each one of a length he’d already calculated. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was going for such overkill: the load beneath the roof was perfectly sufficient. But no: removing this excrescence in its entirety would be his opening gift—his housewarming present, so to speak—to 1881.
He slipped down into the tower, pulled the ceiling cover back into place, and picking up the dark lantern, descended the stairs one last time, uncoiling and attaching the fuses, ensuring that all his handiwork had been properly secreted away, before returning once again to the city.
His city.